Has anyone come up with a good Windows 3.x theme?

Has anyone come up with a good Windows 3.x theme? Sept 9, 2022 15:59:49 GMT -8

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Post by OrthodoxWin32 on Sept 9, 2022 15:59:49 GMT -8

Actually, I've been researching this for some time. I ended up noticing several problems, then I cleared several avenues of work.

Here are my first two posts on this subject :

www.winclassic.net/post/8905/thread

www.winclassic.net/post/9671/thread

At this point, I had come to the conclusion that the only way was to:

- Dynamically inject GDI or WIN32K.SYS (the rendering may be potentially perfect, but the implementation complicated).
- Modify the High Contrast part of the Aerolite visual style

I then found two other leads :

It is possible to directly change the appearance of the classic theme by modifying certain window properties (for example with Window Detective).

Adding the WS_EX_STATIC_EDGE property to a window makes the window frame look like Windows 3.x\NT 3.x.

Adding the BS_FLAT property to a button makes it flat (as the name suggests).

Adding the WS_BORDER property to a button make the button similary than Windows 3.x\NT 3.x (the only difference is the rounded corners).

Disabling the WS_EX_CLIENTEDGE property of checkboxes and edit boxes, then adding the WS_BORDER property makes them similar to Windows 3.x.

Some of these settings do not apply correctly to WinForm type controls or other controls that mimic Win32.

The ideal would be to be able to automate this. It should be easy with AHK, but probably too slow. The ideal would be a DLL injection.

In the screenshots, red stands for WindowFrame.

www.winclassic.net/thread/1345/modify-classic-theme

AccentColorizer is a tool for coloring user interface elements according to the accent color. This includes GDI managed elements and visual style elements.
What is very interesting in this tool is that it demonstrates that it is possible to change the colors of elements of the visual style on the fly. For now, the accent color is used, but it's probably possible to set any color, and add other visual style elements.
This can revolutionize visual style creation. For example, to create a fork of AccentColorizer affiliated with a Windows 3.x visual style.

github.com/krlvm/AccentColorizer

www.winclassic.net/thread/1361/accentcolorizer

For AccentColorizer, my idea is to use or create a Windows 3.x visual style (.msstyle), like Gumball, then create an adapted version of AccentColorizer, with, for example, automatic colorization of the center of the button with a ButtonFace color, or an automatic colorization of the window border with the WindowFrame color.

The Jackal: windows81712 Directly linking to the picture on your computer won't work...you need to upload it somewhere first, like Imgur or postimages.org. Mar 13, 2023 13:40:53 GMT -8

bran: working on a C++ app which enables the classic theme. i want it to be out of the way, unlike SCT which is very invasive. currently have the base functionality working in win 11!!! Mar 21, 2023 12:14:20 GMT -8

OrthodoxWin32: bran I'm pretty sure it's possible, Feodor2 managed to port Mozilla's Rust compiler on Windows XP : github.com/Feodor2/Mypal68/ Mar 23, 2023 15:40:31 GMT -8

Has anyone come up with a good Windows 3.x theme?

Post by freedom7341 on Sept 7, 2022 19:01:19 GMT -8

Post by kakureta on Sept 7, 2022 19:05:31 GMT -8

Post by freedom7341 on Sept 9, 2022 15:44:38 GMT -8

Post by OrthodoxWin32 on Sept 9, 2022 15:59:49 GMT -8

Shoutbox